About

Crystal Heart - a colourful setting for Savage Worlds

£25,802

pledged of £12,000 goal

700

backers

Crystal Heart is a new setting for the popular Savage Worlds role-playing game. It's based on the current storyline in our webcomic, which has been running for several years. Our protagonists have been having a blast with it, and now you can too!

In the world of Crystal Heart, people's hearts are literally made of stone. Some people – notably, the player characters – can replace their hearts with ancient Crystals, which grant unique arrays of superpowers... but also change their personality.

With your help we'll be able to finish and publish the setting book. Countless of Crystals still wait to be discovered across the Five Lands - off we go, to adventure!

Get a taste of the full game by playing Crystal Heart right now! The free Starter Set includes the rules for using Crystals, six ready-to-play Agents, and a one-shot adventure.

You’ll also need the Savage Worlds Deluxe rules, available in a free and shortened version or in full. Note: The Starter Set was created for the Deluxe edition of Savage Worlds. The newest edition (Adventure) will become available soon, and the setting book is being written for it.

More Free Downloads

Use the characters from the Starter Set to play these Adventure Shards, free new adventures in the world of Crystal Heart!

Exemplars of Syn - Two of our Heroic Agents (the rest will be created by you!), problematic people with perilous power.

Read All About Death! - In the dank streets of Bogovia's largest city, mailmen keep dying as they distribute the new "News Letter". But why? Available for our backers, in this update.

Savage Worlds is a tabletop role-playing game published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group (PEG). It’s a set of core rules that can be used as-is or adapted to suit a genre or setting (like Crystal Heart!). Its slogan is Fast! Furious! Fun!, which is exactly what it is designed to provide. It’s a simple, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use system that lets you get right into the thick of the action.

If you want to get a taste of Savage Worlds, or quickly explain it to your players, we've created Ready to Roll: a 2-page comic explaining the basic rules of the system.

This game references the Savage Worlds game system, available from Pinnacle Entertainment Group at www.peginc.com. Savage Worlds and all associated logos and trademarks are copyrights of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Used with permission. Pinnacle makes no representation or warranty as to the quality, viability, or suitability for purpose of this product.

The setting book will be printed in softcover "graphic novel" format (6.625 by 10.125 inches; 17 cm x 26 cm), with about 200 pages in full colour, and tons of new art by Aviv.

The book includes:

Rules for using and misusing Crystals

A few dozen Crystals for your characters to start with

A few dozen Crystals for your players to find, including their feral manifestations – the strange effects surrounding uncontrolled Crystals

Guidelines for using and creating Crystals

Everything you need to know about Syn (and a few of the things you shouldn’t know)

Everything you need to know about the world of Crystal Heart and each of the Five Lands in order to have fun adventures in them

And all the Edges, Hindrances, weapons and setting rules you need in order to get the coolest Crystal Heart experience possible.

Mockup for the Crystal Heart setting book

A typical Crystal Heart adventure begins with the Agents arriving at a new locale, sent by Syn to chase after rumours of Crystal activity. They might face natural hazards, angry locals, cunning rivals, pits filled with venomous snakes, or death traps. What's more, any of these might be corrupted by the Crystal's power, manifesting uncontrollably and twisting its environment.

Upon reaching Veteran Rank the characters become Free Agents, able to pursue their own agendas. By now, however, they have seen enough clues to learn of a mysterious connecting thread, woven behind the scenes, an overarching plot that must be foiled. Chasing these leads throughout the Five Lands they'll eventually uncover the secret and face the villain!

Up to Four Players is a webcomic about tabletop games and the gamers who game them. It follows a group of friends playing a tabletop role-playing game, with all the cool, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprising things that happen when you’re involved in such an activity.

There are now more than 3 years worth of strips and pages in our archive, and it's all available on uptofourplayers.com.

In Wild at Heart, the players get used to the characters they just created, as they chase a bestial killer threatening a small Bogovian village.

In Home is Where the HeartIs, our Agents arrive at an ancient manor deep in the swamps, confronting the worst enemy of all - the one you can't just stab with a sword.

In Heart of Stone, our current storyline, the Agents find themselves in the middle of a civil war brewing in the mining community of Cragtown, while trying to get a grip over a new Crystal.

Read the story and get to know the setting - and even learn to play Savage Worlds as you do!

If you want an add-on, add its cost to your pledge! You will be able to choose your add-on(s) in the post-Kickstarter survey we'll be sending to your email, once the campaign is done.

You will also be able to buy add-ons after the Kickstarter has ended through the pledge manager, but adding their cost to your pledge now means getting closer to those sweet, sweet Stretch Goals!

If we reach our goal, we’ll go on to fund lots of new adventures (created by newcomer game designers), additional art and content for the book, custom Crystal-themed bennies, and maybe even an Adventure Deck and the signature dice set from the comics!

Stretch Goals

How does Crystal Heart play? Is it fun? What's Savage Worlds like? Are we cool people? So many questions, so here's a video with many answers:

More Actual Plays

Check out various Crystal Heart adventures played with various people:

Best Pal Brigade (video) are new Savage Worlds players, playing Kyle's original adventure.

C Wilson Trull (audio) runs his own Island adventure to his daughter and her friend.

The Wandering Gamer Network (audio) have been running a Crystal Heart campaign for a long time, starting with A Weapon to Kill For (available in the Starter Set) and continuing to their own adventures.

Modifier (audio) - How the setting was designed to evoke specific player behaviours and emotional responses.

Much of the book is already written, but most of the production work is still ahead of us.

PDF Products: All PDFs, including the setting book itself, are expected to be ready June 2019. We'll be delivering them through DriveThruRPG.com, the industry standard for digital products.

Physical Products: All physical products are expected to start shipping August 2019. We'll be shipping them from fulfilment centres in the UK and US, in order to lower fees and duties as much as possible.

Below is a list of estimated shipping costs of different pledge levels and add-ons:

We’re Aviv and Eran, two London-based gamers, originally from Israel, who work in and around the tabletop gaming industry. We enjoy various creative activities, which include, of course, games!

Eran Aviram (@nnesk) - You might know Eran's editing and design work from City of Mist, and soon, EN5ider. If you're from Israel, you also know him from most RPG products, translated or original, since 2002. Listen to his weekly RPG podcast, On the Shoulders of Dwarves.

Us, artist's interpretation

We're working with Amit Moshe of Son of Oak Game Studios, who amassed a lot of experience with planning, developing, producing, and fulfilling Kickstarter pledges. Our combined experience stretches over 7 crowdfunding projects, including the highly successful City of Mist: Nights of Payne Town, and four independent role-playing games.

Contributors

Rachael Cruz is a writer, artist, and all-around nice person best known for her work with Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, Star Trek Adventures, Infinity, Fantasy AGE, and Languard Locations.

Tineke Bolleman is an aspiring freelance writer from the Netherlands who loves RPGs in all its forms, whether tabletop, LARP or digital.

Abby Hipolito is a Filipino/Chinese queer woman that's been DM'ing longer than she's been playing and, given the chance, plans to bring more diversity into the design force with future works.

Craig Duffy is a geneticist, gamer and all-round geek from the UK, he releases adventure starters and game hacks for Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors as LunarShadow Designs.

Michael Stone has been playing RPG’s for 35 years, and has to write and GM adventures when a good setting sets his brain on fire.

Laurent Fevre is a French fan and player of Savage Worlds, and an active contributor of the French community through Torgan.net, mostly sharing contents, helps and translations.

Risks and challenges

The book is not yet finished, but the core exists, and we've already had a first playtest cycle with the 100 or so pages we currently have (results were very promising). We're expecting a second playtest cycle, with finalised text, in a few months.

We've already done much of the production legwork: finding printers, shipping partners, and the like. It's difficult to predict the impact of Brexit on the future of the gaming industry in the UK and Europe. One possible impact could be a significant change of prices in shipping to Europe, in which case we may have to update our estimated prices.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge £175 or more
About US$ 221

Heroic Agent Creator

There are only 12 Heroic Agents of Syn, but only two have been created by us. The rest are yours!
You'll create a character (with our guidance) that will appear in the book as one of the Heroic Syn Agents, drawn by Aviv.